But when inconvenient claims, like "vaccines can cause blood clots in rare cases", often flagged as misinformation, you don't instil much confidence with the public.
And so they go out and get information from other sources.
Can you identify anyone who actually believes that? Keep in mind that people don't always have logically consistent beliefs, and they sometimes exaggerate their beliefs so they're not even true at all. If I really believed that claim, I would be making a bet with somebody who doesn't believe it and prove myself right by finding this hulk and asking them to punch a hole in a brick wall of flip a car over or something like that. Are there people who have put their own skin in the game like that to support that belief? If not, you're probably strawmanning.
I'm not sure if you are trolling but even though Hulk is a hypothetical example, people believe equally strange things, such as invisible microchips inside face masks, viruses being spread by 5G cell towers, that the world is flat and Australia does not exist.
I used to have a conversation with a crank who kept almost inventing perpetual motion machines. But every time he had nearly finished one, he somehow didn't quite do the last few steps. He talked like he believed they would work but somebody who actually believed that would be chomping at the bit to finish one and prove it working. They'd be richer than God. It seems like some part of him knew it wouldn't and he preferred to enjoy the fantasy of being an unrecognized genius. Does that kind of thinking count as a belief or not? I don't think it's really clear cut. You see a similar inconsistency with religious people who "believe" they'll go to heaven when they die but they still try not to die.
Then half the population is mentally ill. Come to think of it, that would explain a lot of issues we are dealing with...
But when massive numbers of people believe these things, blaming it on individual problems is not so productive. About 300 people a day are dying because intense political polarization has caused people to believe whatever best feeds their tribal urges. The same thing caused an attack on the US seat of government, and a very large percentage of the population thinks that's ok.
I don't know the solution, short of us declaring that the internet and cable tv was a bad idea and we need to go back to simpler times of unconnected computers and 3 TV networks. But I'd agree that facebook, Twitter, etc has to do something.
>They
>us
How do you know “your side” is right?
Read your comment again, but consider a hypothesis that you are entirely wrong about most things - how would you know? Everyone seems to lack a consideration that there is even a possibility they could be wrong.
If they are exposed two sides, and you one, how do you know you are right? You probably are. But… it’s the absolutism that is starting to become obvious to me.
With this set of tools, it is in fact possible to determine that some ideas are meritless bull. We see a proliferation of the latter right now.
Facebook isn’t the internet. It’s not even very interesting.
Regarding things like the covid vaccine, you can look at the 96% vaccination rate of doctors or you can listen to basically every single immunology or virology expert. It is quite telling that pretty much the only doctors making the media rounds fear mongering about the vaccine are gastroenterologists, opthalmologists, or other unrelated fields.
So no, nothing is certain, but some things are pretty close to certain.
Not one election fraud case was rejected on merit and claims. None were heard. All were denied via process. This isn't a surprise. All lower courts are going to boot them, they aren't the place to hear this, I watched the hearings where the judges rejected and immediately facilitate getting the time sensitive paperwork ready for appeals. The higher courts rejected even the idea of hearing them for various reasons including the establishment right wanted Trump to remain in office as much as the establishment left.
Including the Supreme Court that ruled that potential federal election fraud or process violations in states wouldn't effect another state. So in this case despite Texas correctly pointing out that other states unquestionably and admittedly violated Article2 by approving election protocols without the consent of their legislatures, that Texas had no standing to sue.
This doesn't mean there was fraud. Doesn't mean there wasn't. But in terms of the scotus case, that was bullshit of the century and if you don't understand what happened (McConnell picked "Trump's" judges and McConnell wanted Trump gone as fast as possible) then you will never understand what really happened.
But to just wave your hands and say "They didn't win trial, all fake!" without admitting none were ever heard, is a willfully ignorant view of what happened. Even the courts sympathetic to Trump weren't going to rock the boat like that. It was always going to go to scotus and they signaled bright and early they weren't going to do it.
That's not true and you obviously have not read through the cases if you think that. Quite a few of the cases were rejected because the judge found the merits so lacking that it didn't even warrant a trial. That's a HUGE indicator that your cases have ZERO merit. Especially when we are talking about sympathetic judges. They didn't just reject the cases for lack of merit, the excoriated many of the attornies that were pushing such garbage into the court system.
In addition, many of the lawyers who brought those cases forward are seeing disbarment and serious sanctions for such frivolous cases. You don't get disbarred or sanctioned for filing a meritorious case with the wrong court. You get them for serious malpractice and bad faith.
Do you mind expanding on what you mean by "[not] rejected on merit and claims", "none were heard", and "all were denied via process"? There are multiple arguments that these are incorrect:
- In the US court systems, dismissal due to failure to state a claim is a decision on the merits (Federated Dep't Stores v. Moitie)
- At least one court did hear claims (barring you and me using different definitions of "hear claims"), and specifically addressed them in their decisions (e.g., Law v. Whitmer included depositions and explicitly ruled on the merits)
- Multiple decisions included an analysis of the claims in addition to analysis of the procedural failings (e.g., the decision in King v. Whitmer addresses 11th Amendment immunity, mootness, laches, abstention, and standing, and also goes on to describe why even if the complaint did not suffer from the previous issues the plaintiffs would not be granted their requested relief).
> The higher courts rejected even the idea of hearing them for various reasons including the establishment right wanted Trump to remain in office as much as the establishment left.
Can you cite anything that would support the latter half of that sentence being a reason appeals courts tended to rule the way they did?
> Including the Supreme Court that ruled that potential federal election fraud or process violations in states wouldn't effect another state.
This is an incorrect reading of the Supreme Court's decision. They said Texas lacked Article III standing, which is not the same thing as what you said. For example, the Supreme Court could agree that potential election fraud or process violations could affect another state, while still ruling that Texas lacks Article III standing due to failing the injury-in-fact requirement (injury is not a) concrete and particularized and b) actual or imminent).
> So in this case despite Texas correctly pointing out that other states unquestionably and admittedly violated Article2 by approving election protocols without the consent of their legislatures
This is almost certainly not as unquestionable as you make it sound; for example, Texas claimed that Pennsylvania's Secretary of State "unilaterally abrogated several Pennsylvania statutes requiring signature verification for absentee or mail-in ballots" without the approval of the legislature, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court pointed out that the Pennsylvania Election Code does not permit the rejection of mail-in ballots based on signature, so if anything the SoS's guidance is aligning with state law more than before.
Based on my own anecdotal evidence, it’s exactly this. The people that went down the rabbit hole of QAnon on YouTube are, in their mind, the informed ones. They’re the ones that went out of their way to do the research and the rest of us are just lemmings. Thus, spending hours staring at an algorithmically generated video feed is actually a positive attribute rather than the obviously negative one the rest of us see.